Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The ancien régime: challenges not met, a dilemma not overcome
- 2 The descent into revolution: from August 1788 to October 1789
- 3 The first attempt to stabilize the Revolution: from 1789 to 1791
- 4 The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution: from 1791 to 1794
- 5 The second attempt to stabilize the revolution: from 1794 to 1799
- Conclusion: the Revolution in the French and global context
- Suggestions for further reading
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The ancien régime: challenges not met, a dilemma not overcome
- 2 The descent into revolution: from August 1788 to October 1789
- 3 The first attempt to stabilize the Revolution: from 1789 to 1791
- 4 The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution: from 1791 to 1794
- 5 The second attempt to stabilize the revolution: from 1794 to 1799
- Conclusion: the Revolution in the French and global context
- Suggestions for further reading
- Index
Summary
The Bicentennial of the French Revolution may have given rise to a flood of commemorative activities, but it has not left in its wake any scholarly consensus on the causation, development, and implications of that vast upheaval. To the contrary, historians barely finished with the pleasurable work of interring a Marxist view of the Revolution regnant in the first half of the twentieth century have turned their spades upon each other, all the while trying to establish their own explanations of cataclysmic events in the France of 1789–99. This book certainly does not expect to restore consensus in a field beset by such controversy, but it can at least hope to put forth some distinctive ideas on the subject. More specifically, it will contend that the Revolution broke out, and unfolded in the way it did, primarily because of competing international and domestic pressures on French governance in the late eighteenth century. By placing the revolutionary experience in such a broad spatial setting, as well as in the broadest possible temporal setting of modern world history, this book aims to present its case in genuinely “global-historical” terms.
Since this study is heavily indebted to the enormous historical and sociological literature on the revolutionary era, a few observations about the debate arising from that literature are first of all in order. We can then outline the argument that is to follow and spell out some of the capital assumptions undergirding that argument.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Reinterpreting the French RevolutionA Global-Historical Perspective, pp. 1 - 13Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002